"Postmodern nightmare of teenybopper coincidence, will make you kecklish"

Delusions and insipidness propel “Jump Tomorrow” further out in orbit than even the characters in “Everyone’s Famous.”

Joel Hopkins’ junky heap of celluloid has decided to give reality the birdie, but what goes around comes around, and hopefully before long, this will be going instead of staying. A gumpy Nigerian man (Tunde Adebimpe) who cannot smile about his three-day-away endogamic marriage is swept away on a New York to Canada road trip with a French wag (Hippolyte Girardot) in pursuit of a young Hispanic gal (Natalia Verbeke) whom he met while at the airport. Roughly more professional looking than early work by John Waters, but not by much, the polar differences between, say, “Mondo Trasho” and “Jump Tomorrow” is that the Waters had next to no funding but an enjoyable concept, and the Hopkins has a budget yet no abstraction. It tries it damnedest to be cheek-pinchingly cute and ebulliently perky, but that contributes only to the vapidity and peskiness that piles up in every other aspect. The Gérard character is the closest to being a construct, but his raison d’être is only to be the personified conscience on our protagonist’s shoulder. Even that is forcing yourself to acclimate to an unnecessary level of annoyance. The whole thing reeks of unprofessionalism, from the banal compositions (if you look closely in the diner scene, you can see the poor editing result in a time-condensed shot of a big-rig truck jumping forward several feet from its last position) to the terribly rickety photography. Hopkins’ disgusting story is a postmodern nightmare of teenybopper coincidence that will make you kecklish. Acting hardly gets any more incompetent and unkempt as this, with the exception of Girardot, which still is nothing much to brag about.